Jason Carr

Thanks, John. You might be able to avoid having to use the batch file (and showing the black box) if you can find and browse to the location of the taskkill.exe file. I'm guessing that's what the original problem was. Or it could be that you need the complete path to JoyToKey.exe.

Hi all, yes, this theme is slightly outdated. I just downloaded it and figured out how to fix it. Just rename the PlatformWheelFiltersView.xaml file (in the Views subfolder) to PlatformWheelImageVideoThumbsFiltersView.xaml. Then switch up the view to the right one and it should work. :)

Thanks all. I agree from a technical perspective, but users have come to know about "fanart" from Kodi, etc., so they know that it should be used as a background, and it has other meaning behind it. I'm afraid that "artwork" would be too generic.

Hi guys, eventually we will be accepting hacks, but for now unfortunately I think we need to just decline the game. Eventually I want to add a Hack or similar field to games along with user options to either hide or show them. For now, though, I think it's best if we don't accept hacks. I agree @moppedz about rejecting complete contributions. Eventually I'd like to add in functionality to help with that, such as suggesting fixes. So that's coming eventually. :)

Hi @VACRMH, you can create custom filters in LaunchBox via the side bar. You'd select Custom Filters from the dropdown at the top, and then click the + button on the sidebar to add a new one. Then of course just put Arcade in the Platform field and Fighting in the Genre Field, give it a name, and save it. That should give you a custom filter that displays all the Arcade Fighting games. Then in Big Box, just back out from the default platforms screen and select View Custom Filters, which will show you Arcade Fighting as an option. Obviously it's not hierarchical like you're ultimately looking for but it's a start at least. :)

Thank you @kerszr.

Hi @crimsonnight, instead of importing via a folder, try using add files. Then go to your wbfs folder, and type *.wbfs into the search box in the top right of the browse dialog. Then select them all with Ctrl+A and see if that works for you. :)

Nice, @slashguns04, that looks amazing! I don't think adding gif support will be very difficult, though hopefully performance isn't an issue as gifs aren't typically meant to be that large (1080p large I mean). I will try and get that added this week, shortly after the 6.4 release. :)

Sure, that makes sense. Obviously we'd want to default to the current ones if the new ones don't exist. Hopefully we can eventually get them in there as a new category with the API but in the mean time it's simple to do it manually since there's only a handful of them. :)

Yeah, absolutely. I think now that we are in need of 1080p videos for the background videos especially, there will likely be a lot more interest. I'd like to make them the default platform video downloads for LaunchBox once we have a good set of them ready. Thanks again @circo. :)

Thanks @kersey. The settings are separate because the interfaces are slightly different between them in LaunchBox, so I wanted to provide that extra control in case you wanted different settings between LaunchBox and Big Box.

I still think these are gorgeous, @circo, and would work wonderfully for the fullscreen background videos in Big Box.

Hi @kerszr, this looks like it's just that BigBox.exe is running or something else is accessing that file. You can try killing BigBox.exe with Task Manager or even just rebooting your machine should hopefully do the trick.

Alright, currently it caches the images at a max width of 400 or max height of 165. So the actual size of the images depends on the aspect ratio, but it never gets bigger than 400x165. This is easy to adjust if it will help to make a significant difference. Edit: It does seem like this is a bit small because on-screen it's displayed at roughly 480 pixels wide on my 1920x1200 monitor. I'll try upping the width to 500x206. Not sure if that's gonna make that much of a difference, but worth a shot. It'll be in the next beta I put out. :)

Thanks @Zombeaver, I'll take a look at what size I'm rendering the images at and stuff.

Hmm, I'm guessing what happened is I resubmitted a few too many of them. I leaned that direction rather than missing any of them. So I guess worst case scenario is we'll end up with a few duplicates.

I see. It's probably not image quality so much as the method used in reduction. If you look in Photoshop, for example, during image reduction you have options to make the image sharper (like the above image) or more blurred (like the below image). So, hmm. We're using the highest quality image reductions possible in .NET, as-is. I'm not sure if there's a way to adjust how sharp the image is without re-writing the image rendering process. I'll take a look.

Killer. Thanks again Spycat. :)

Gotcha, thanks @spycat. I think they'll still automatically be approved when the game is approved but I'll check to make sure.

Yes, I'm guessing that was caused by opening them all up as well. Go ahead and delete the items that don't have any English translations as they won't be used anywhere. Thanks again Opak.

Zombeaver said So I made a quick stop by the house to check these out in Big Box. As I feared from the get go, none of the scanlines are visible in Big Box, even at 150% scale. It seems like there's some serious downsampling and/or filtering going on for clear logos. I did a little digging in the options menu to see if I could find anything that would help, and noticed that in the "General" section there's a setting for "Coverflow Image Quality" which, by default, is set to "High (Slow)" but has a step above that - "Highest (Slowest)". As I kindof anticipated, however, this doesn't seem to have any impact on the quality of the clear logos. @Jason any chance of getting a similar option for clear logos? Pretty pretty please? If you want me to submit a Bitbucket ticket for that, I can. I know, I know... picky/OCD/anal/what-have-you... I won't deny it. These all look incredible, @Zombeaver! The problem with the scanlines in Big Box isn't because the image quality is reduced; it's just that they're a lot smaller in Big Box. Since the scanlines are so close together, there's no room in the image for the scanlines once the size is reduced. Unfortunately scanlines get hairy really quick when you reduce the size of an image and there's not really anything we can do about that. You could try spacing them out a bit more, but then it would look silly at the large size.

Alright, and now all previously automatically rejected games are being pushed through the moderation queue. From what I can tell, we are good to go now. Again, sorry for all the trouble. Glad there was no data loss. :) Of course, let me know if you guys run into any additional issues. Now we can go back to improving things. This latest deploy should include the platform changes.

I believe I have this fixed now guys, praise the Lord. As it turns out, all new games submitted to the database since I last deployed the delete games functionality were being automatically rejected. No one was even seeing them in the moderation process. It boils down to me being an idiot, basically, but what else is new. ;) So now my immediate task is to re-send all of these rejected games back through the moderation process. Thanks for bearing with me on all this.

Okay, I'm sorry for all the trouble there @Opaklopper. Thanks for sticking with it. Do make sure to use the files from the existing package though, of course (don't go back to an old copy of the files). That way it should keep the visual changes I made to fix all the forms.

Okay, thanks guys. I'll take a look at the closing issues for VLC in Big Box. @DOS76, well that's a new one, sigh. I have a feeling that is going to be extremely hard to reproduce. But I will try.